To reach out to brands, pick companies your audience already buys from, find the person who runs creator partnerships, and send a short pitch with proof of engagement. When a brand replies, the deal arrives as a contract, so know your usage and exclusivity position before you press send.
This guide covers both halves of reaching out to brands: getting the conversation started, and knowing your position when a brand replies. A reply opens a negotiation that ends in a contract, and the terms in that contract decide what the collaboration is actually worth.
Pick brands your audience already buys from
The strongest thing you can offer a brand is an audience that already cares about its category. Scroll your own comments and DMs: the products people ask you about are your pitch list. Smaller and mid-sized UK brands reply more often than household names, and a brand already running creator content has a budget line for it, so check the accounts a brand tags and reposts before you write a word.
Aim for a shortlist of ten to fifteen brands rather than a spreadsheet of a hundred. Outreach works on fit, and fit takes a few minutes of looking per brand.
Find the person, not the info@ inbox
Pitches die in general inboxes. Look for whoever runs partnerships or influencer marketing: search the brand name on LinkedIn together with "partnerships", "influencer" or "social". Many UK brands list a press or collaborations email on their site, which beats the contact form. For smaller brands, a DM to the brand account is a reasonable fallback, because the person posting is often the person deciding.
Keep the pitch short and specific
A pitch that gets answered usually fits on one phone screen. Say who you are and what your audience is, offer one concrete content idea for this brand, and back it with proof: your engagement rate, a relevant past post, or an audience statistic that matches their customer. If you have a media kit, link it.
Do not attach a rate card. Rates come after the brand describes the brief, because the brief decides the rate: deliverables, usage and exclusivity all move the number, and none of them are visible before the brand tells you what it wants.
Follow up once
Silence usually means busy rather than no. Send one follow-up about a week later, two lines on top of the original message. After that, move to the next brand on your shortlist. Outreach is a numbers game played politely, and the creators who get deals are usually the ones still sending pitches in month three.
Be ready for the part after yes
When the pitch works, an agreement lands in your inbox, and two clauses in it will do more to set the value of the deal than anything you wrote in the pitch.
The first is usage.
Show: Find the section headed "Usage Rights", "Licence" or "Grant of Rights". A usage period, sometimes called a licence period, sets how long a brand can use your content after a campaign. The wording to watch for is "perpetual", "irrevocable", or a grant with no end date at all.
Decode: A licence with no end date means the fee you agreed covers one campaign while the content keeps working for the brand indefinitely. They do not pay you again, and the licence is typically written so consent cannot be withdrawn. Priced per month of use, a perpetual grant makes any fee look small.
Fix: Ask for a defined window before you sign. Say: "I offer 12 months of organic usage from the final post, with paid usage and extensions priced separately."
The second is exclusivity. Category exclusivity means you cannot work with competing brands for a defined period. A wide lock can cost more in declined work than the deal pays. Naming your position early ("exclusivity against named competitors only, category-wide priced separately") saves a harder conversation later. The category exclusivity clause guide covers how broad these clauses can reach, the usage period guide shows what a bounded licence looks like, and what "in perpetuity" means in a brand deal unpacks the phrase that removes the window altogether.
Quoting with terms attached also changes how your pitch reads. A creator who says "one video, 12 months organic usage, exclusivity against named competitors for 60 days" sounds like someone brands can do business with, and any later request for more rights is visibly a bigger purchase rather than a free amendment.